Melbourne-made game Florence wins Apple Design Award at WWDC

A wonderfully unusual game developed in Australia has won a coveted Apple Design Award at the company's Worldwide Developer Conference.

Ken Wong is the founder and creative director at Mountains, a small development team based in Melbourne, and accepted the award for their game Florence, which tells the story of young love and all its messy, awkward and sometimes heartbreaking ways.

Game designer Ken Wong at Apple's WWDC this week.

The app plays more like an interactive graphic novel than a traditional game. Players interact with Florence in small vignettes of her relationship, with puzzles conveying the emotion of the scene. In our original review of the game we wrote: "Conveying the feelings of infatuation, familiarity and estrangement better than most, Florence is an animated short that leverages interactivity in a unique and satisfying way."

"I'm incredibly proud of my team, and it's wonderful to have their hard work recognised with this [award]," Wong said in accepting the honour. "Apple's simple but beautiful approach to design has been a constant inspiration to our game development work."

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Florence was released for iPhone and iPad in February this year, and has since made the jump to Android as well.

Wong was also lead designer at global agency ustwo (which has studios in Syndey, London, Malmo and New York), when it produced another of the App Store's most loved and awarded titles, 2014's meditative Monument Valley.

Florence's success seems to indicate there's still a market for small, beautiful games from boutique developers.

But while everything about Florence, from gameplay to design, appears to be completely different to Wong's first surprise hit, he himself says there is a common sensibility.

"A lot of people see them as different, but I see more similarities than differences", Wong tells Fairfax Media.

"Both games made a deliberate move away from the idea of games as a challenge, as something you're trying to defeat. And both games feature no dialogue, which has a profound effect on the audience. By not using language to define the experience, it allows the player to read their own experiences, feed their own memories, into the game."

Wong says the widespread success of Monument Valley came as a surprise to him and ustwo, and the experience had a big impact when it came to Florence, Mountains' first game.

Ken Wong accepts the Apple Design Award at WWDC.

"We thought we were making a game for hipsters, you know? People like us who appreciate design. But by making a really inviting, clear, accessible experience, the game broke out of our community. We began hearing from families and couples who would play the game together, older people, little kids, who all loved the game," Wong says of Monument Valley.

"So when I started my own game studio, one of my missions was to continue that idea. Lower friction games that are easier to play. Making games for people who don't play games."

Part of what makes Florence so intriguing is that it tells an age-old story about falling in and out of love, but it does so in an unmistakably modern setting and using narrative tools that could only exist on a smartphone. Wong says he immediately locked on to love stories as a universal theme that was underserved in video games, although it did come with challenges.

"I've actually never worked on so much of a narrative experience before, and the whole idea of creating characters; it's a little terrifying," he says.

"So I drew from my own knowledge, making Florence a Chinese Australian like me, and setting the game in Melbourne. When we decided on Florence's love interest as being Indian Australian, that informed the storytelling.

"They became real, living characters for us, and their ethnic background and their family dynamic formed the story. And rather than pushing people away, the specificity of the story actually helps its universal appeal."

As for what comes next, Florence's success would seem to indicate there's still plenty of room in the market for small, beautiful games from boutique developers like Mountains.

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"Art and storytelling have always been a part of creating games, but in the past they have often been downplayed compared to commercial success and action-driven thrills," Wong says.

"Games could do a lot more of telling the stories of more people. In games like Mario, the bricks and the icons and enemies are abstract symbols, whereas Florence leans into real culture backgrounds, and I think there's a want for these stories, these real, emotional experiences."